John & Julie Gottman, PhDs: Why We Should Fight
Doctors John and Julie Gottman are two of the most famous and popular couples therapists in the world—not only because of their ability to impart relationship-saving and relationship-strengthening advice, but because of John Gottman’s decades of reearch in the so called “Love Lab,” where he observed couples over time and could predict—with a dizzying level of success—who was destined to divorce.
In short, the Gottmans are the world’s leading relationship scientists, having gathered data on thousands of couples—they then use those findings to train clinicians and create simple principles for couples around the world.
In their latest book, Fight Right, they explore conflict—something we’re all trained to avoid at all costs. Their point though, which their research supports, is that conflict is essential for healthy relationships, clearing out the brush of stagnant resentments and deepening bonds.
In today’s conversation, we explore everything from fighting styles—there’s avoiders, validators, and volatiles—along with our tendency to start conflict harshly because we feel like we need a lot of ammo to justify the rupture and make our point. And then we move to modes and paths of repair, along with what their latest research can tell us about infidelity and its root cause. I loved this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.
MORE FROM JOHN & JULIE GOTTMAN:
Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection
The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection, and Joy
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
The Gottman Institute: A Research-Based Approach to Relationships
Gottman Relationship Quiz: How Well Do You Know Your Partner?
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: As always, I feel like your books are well timed, right? The whole world needs a primer on Conflict, and how essential it is, and how it can bring us into connection, but how difficult it is, and we all lack this basic training, right? This is not something that we're taught, which is so unfortunate, right? As this core reality of being human, why are we not taught how to have healthy conflict?
JULIE GOTTMAN: Yeah. I think a lot of religions say that conflict isn't a good thing, that you shouldn't be angry, that you should be kind, you should be loving, you should be compassionate, and all of that is true, but it ignores 50 percent of human nature, and human nature really likes at times to voice its own point of view against somebody else's. Thus, you're going to have conflict. So, it is something that we really, really need to learn. And the only way we learn it is by watching, typically, our caretakers, our parents or our grandparents, and see how they did it. And we either do the same or we do the opposite. And usually, both are wrong. That's why we were so glad that John and Robert Levinson did this incredible research using 15 minutes of conflict that they observed in couples to really see how the successful couples did conflict versus the disasters.
JOHN GOTTMAN: It's common, at least in the United States, to believe that conflict is just purposeless. And yet, it really does have a goal, which is mutual understanding. And so if you can move two people who disagree with one another, and who love each other to a place of mutual understanding, then conflict can actually bring them closer, instead of them being like enemies or strangers.
ELISE: Certainly, and it's powerful the way that your research evidences that. And the other thing that I really loved that you explored at some length is that anger, which so many, particularly women, are cautioned away from or conditioned to not express, but we certainly feel it, right? And all humans are in some ways aggressive. And we all, as you just said, Julie, have needs that need to be stated and met. And yet we're taught that anger is scary, demonic, only crazy, right? Particularly for women, the epithets go on and on, hysterical, but that it's an approach emotion. I had never heard this. Can you guys talk a little bit about what that means?
JOHN: Yeah, this is really based on the researcher Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin and emotions are different in the two halves of the frontal lobes and on the right side. We tend to process emotions that make us withdraw from the world: disgust, fear, sadness. On the right side, there are all the approach emotions: interest, curiosity, amusement, humor, and anger, it engages us with the world. And because Bob Levinson and I really studied couples over time, We found that, yeah, a woman's anger is not very pleasant for her partner in the immediate sense, but in the long term, her expressing anger really is good for the relationship, it makes it better. So women who suppress anger in their relationships wind up having relationships that deteriorate, but particularly for women, if they can express their anger in a way that's functional and useful, it improves their relationship over time.
ELISE: I mean, that's one of the most foundational discoveries, right? It's going against this idea that An ideal state would be a no conflict zone, and that in some ways the least expressive couples might be the healthiest. But that's not true, right?
JULIE: No, it really isn't true. Though, couples who avoid conflict can also have good relationships, doesn't necessarily mean they have bad relationships. So, we discovered three different, call it styles, of how couples fight, or don't fight. One is the avoidant couple, who just, agree to disagree. You know, they may bring up an issue, but they don't argue and they don't try to persuade the other person that they're right and the other is wrong. And then there are validating couples who will definitely bring up problems, but they fight in a very calm and a little bit more rational way. They do engage in persuasion, but it doesn't have very, very intense emotions. Like the third type, which are volatile couples. And volatile couples are the ones who are very passionate, very intense. They express their emotions fully about almost everything. And so their conflicts are hot, you know, they're like a fire. But the interesting thing is that volatile couples develop tremendous intimacy. As those emotions, which often are vulnerable emotions, they display to one another so that the other is really seeing the real ways of how they feel. And that is very precious. That's important in a relationship. It's kind of like you're turning yourself inside out and saying, see, here I am. This is who I am. Accept me. And they tend to accept each other in successful relationships, even with all that hot emotion
JOHN: But what's the secret, Julie?
JULIE: The secret is you've got to avoid the four horsemen, which are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. And the other huge thing that Bob Levinson and John discovered is that the successful couples, no matter what type, have of a ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions that are at least five to one, five positives to one negative, and that's a lot of positivity, but positivity is very simple to accomplish. It could be a head nod, just like you're doing now. It can be a smile. It can be a few words like, okay, good point, fair enough. Those are all positives. Doesn't take a huge energy push to create positivity. Just showing that you're interested that you care about what the partner is saying you don't have to agree with your partner, but you're doing a good job of listening of empathizing and showing that you really do want to hear what the partner has to say.
ELISE: And you're open to influence, although some more than others, right? And the three that you listed are healthy, right? And you might be with a validator, might be with an avoider, or do you typically find, more often than not, that people are well matched, you'll have two volatile people in the healthy? I would imagine that there's volatile with avoidant that can be very unhealthy.
JOHN: Yeah, they're the mismatches are really interesting. And what Bob Levinson and I discovered what the mismatches, if they're not really dealt with, then they predict couples getting divorced, because the person who wants persuasion sees the other person who avoids or tries to be rational as a validator as very distant and cold. And the other person sees the conflict engager as kind of crazy, you know, they just want fight all time. And yet, you know, if we intervene, you know, in the last 26 years, Julie and I have been working on, how do you turn a disaster couple into a master couple? And how do you avoid disaster? That actually turns out to be pretty easy thing to solve, that mismatch. Because they can come to a common way of dealing with conflict that really works for both.
ELISE: Yeah. In the book you gave an example of, I think it's the man who's the aggressor who's trying to get a rise out of his wife because he sees it as a way of, I guess engagement, intimacy, just once that, you know, that head on collision and she finds it bullying and or it shuts her down. She starts, I think, distancing and stonewalling him. Is it enough for people, when you're working with couples, to say, listen, your wife likes conflict. This turns her on in some way. Is it enough for people to be able to identify themselves and their style and their partner's style in order to navigate it more productively? Is that enough to reset the stage?
JULIE: No, it depends on what else is on the stage, right? If one of the partners is used to bringing up problems with criticism or with contempt and criticism, let me define that, means blaming the partner for a problem, personality flaw of that partner. Contempt means also blaming the other person, but doing so from a position of superiority, with a little scorn and disgust thrown in for good measure. So if that's going on, then the other partner tends to be defensive or shutting down, as you just described. And shutting down because they are getting what we call flooded where their heart rates are going over 100 beats a minute. Their blood pressure is rising. They're breathing more shallowly typically.
It's the same as fight or flight, so that person, if they go into fight or flight, shuts down in order to go inside and try and calm themselves down. That's what they're doing during flooding. Any of those, we call the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So again, there are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. And people don't know the alternatives to those. So even if they identify what style, what category they belong in, in terms of their own fighting identity, let's say, they still need the right tools in order to not set off the other person feeling attacked, to not sabotage their getting listened to, and to be able to really have a conversation that feels respectful.
ELISE: There's a funny line where you say that the question that you get asked most frequently is what are people fighting about? And the answer is nothing, you know, everything and nothing. I'm sure anyone listening who's been in a relationship with someone can recognize how quickly you can escalate about really dumb stuff right because there's typically underlying issues or unmet dreams, We can talk about that in a minute, but that you guys clarify the typical cycle, that you always, you never, the kitchen sinking, the way that we are upset and instead of saying, this is really just about a single issue, we could kitchen sink it, to use your words, to justify our rage. Can you talk about sort of the typical disaster? But most typical format or stage of a fight that you guys see?
JOHN: One of the things that we've really studied is what makes conflicts escalate this way and become dysfunctional. And one of the things is that we often don't ask for what we need. And we feel like we don't have a right to really have needs. And so we think our partner should be able to read our minds and intuit what we need rather than us asking for what we need. And the other is if we dismiss our partners negative emotions, if we try to minimize them and don't really listen, well, then conflicts escalate because people feel dismissed and a lot of times just turning away from an attempt to connect with your partner and just be closer, when that gets ignored or rejected, that also can escalate conflict.
ELISE: and that's like "hey, listen to the sentence" or "look at that bird."
JULIE: Yeah, you know, one of the things that John and Bob also found in their research that just kind of blew our minds is that the first three minutes of a conflict conversation predicts not only how the rest of the conversation will go, it also predicts how the rest of the relationship will go, five to six years down the road. So how you bring up a conflict, just saying after you've said to your partner, listen, we need to talk, you can either address the problem with criticism by saying something like, you know what? You are so lazy. You never get up after dinner and start doing the dishes. Never. And it just, I hate it. All right, there's the criticism, "you never,"-- never and always imply a personality flaw in the partner. So there's the criticism versus what we saw the successful couples doing, which was basically a three step process. They would say, I feel some emotion about what, what's the situation they're having a feeling about. And here's my positive need, meaning here's what I do want you to do to shine for me, not what I don't like or resent. So in that same situation, it would sound like, you know, honey, I am really tired of always having to do the dishes. There are the dishes, and I'm the one who gets up. And I would love to be able to share that task with you. Would you be willing, at least some of the time, to also get up and approach doing the dishes? That would make a big difference for me. And there's the positive need. You know, in this country, I think, Elise, and maybe in, I don't know, maybe in many other countries as well, this is a country which is based on the philosophy of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. You know, be an individual. Don't lean on anybody. Don't ask for what you need, because that means you're a sissy, or you're weak, or God forbid you're feminine. Asking for your needs to be met is sometimes categorized as being effeminate, which is outrageous. Because every single human being is a pack animal. That's what we are biologically. We would die if we didn't depend on each other. Saying what you need is a form of connecting with your partner and saying, let's be a team. Can you serve me in this way? Can I trust you to have my back? Because I've got yours. And I want to be there for you. The other thing that people don't realize is that when they ask their partner for something they need, what they're doing is saying to the partner, you are my chosen one. You are my confidant. You are the person I trust more than anybody to be there for me. And the other person may feel very honored by that, actually. What that person is saying is you are trustworthy. You are the person that I know has the strength and the resources to be there for me.
JOHN: In just two weeks, we're going to be presenting at the evolution of psychotherapy conference, actually next week, next week. Okay. The results of our study on treating infidelity in couples, a very successful study, the first real control group study in this area. And one of the basic ingredients of making a relationship a fair proof is complaining to your partner rather than then complaining to somebody else about your partner. It's a critical, critical difference.
ELISE: Whoa. And those complaints can include your complaints about your partner, but is it that as soon as you start triangulating any intimacy that you're opening doors to other transgressions?
JOHN: When you feel lonely and really sorry for yourself and confide in somebody else about how awful your partner is being to you, then you're giving yourself permission to cross boundaries. And that's the beginning of a lot of affairs.
JULIE: There is a fabulous clinical psychologist, unfortunately she's passed by now. Her name is Shirley Glass, and she wrote a book called Not Just Friends. What that book was all about is, you know, at the water cooler, at work, meeting somebody there, just offhand, another person in the office and saying, Oh God, I had a horrible night last night. The other person saying what happened and this partner saying, Well, you know, my wife was really being mean to me. She was being a jerk. She couldn't find anything I was doing right. She only pointed out what I was doing wrong. And it felt horrible. And then the other person is being empathetic and caring, maybe putting her hand on the other person's arm and saying, Oh, God, that must have felt terrible, awful. And there they are, they're building a connection that goes against the actual marital bond. The beginning of an affair. Shirley Glass also said that what is ideal in a marriage is to have a window between you and your partner and a fence around the marriage that you're not transgressing. You're not crossing over, so complaints, confiding, and so on, of course, you can have a best friend, that's a little different, but really taking the complaints to that partner so that you can continue to deepen your connection, understand each other's vulnerabilities, which may have played a role In the fight or whatever is going on with you and coming to some kind of resolution or compromise or even agreement to disagree. That's okay, too. As long as it's the partner you're talking to about.
ELISE: Mm. How do you even set up a study like that to understand the underlying mechanisms? Are you talking about what happened in the aftermath?
JOHN: Well, you know, it's really interesting, Elise, because a researcher named Carol Rusbold really studied commitment for about 30 years in couples who haven't had an affair. Our research is the only research ever done that can predict which couples have an affair, whether they're gay, lesbian, or mixed sex couples. And it's the moment when things aren't going well, if you start thinking, I can do better, a real or imagined relationship, I can do better, that you stop cherishing what you have, you start trashing what you have, and thinking about what you're missing. And then you start giving yourself permission to cross boundaries, to not give voice to your complaints to your partner, but to complain to somebody else about your partner.
ELISE: God, it's so obvious and yet it's amazing to hear it validated, right? I mean, just listening to that, you can recognize that impulse to seek comfort or consolation or even someone to say you're right, you know, oh, that's so hard. I can completely imagine how that starts to happen.
JULIE: Another thing that we saw in couples who were having affairs, it was so interesting, is that many couples would begin by having pretty bad fights. They'd be having terrible fights. There'd be a lot of criticism. There might be contempt. A lot of conflicts that didn't have resolution and that were very painful to one or both partners. After a while, those conflicts felt so aversive that couples began to avoid having conflicts, avoid talking about what felt wrong in their relationship, what needs were not getting met. They didn't want to bring them up because the conflicts were so awful and terrible and painful.
So they would bury their complaints Down a layer inside themselves and hold them inside and avoid talking to the partner. So there'd be a lot of distance being created because they weren't bringing up their real needs to their partner. That produced loneliness. That distancing produced loneliness, and the loneliness fed their looking at other people as potential alternate partners that might understand them better, might be able to hear them better, and might not feed them the toxins of criticism and contempt.
ELISE: You write a bit about infidelity and fight right, and I think you make this case like typically, there's a lot of therapy that's required for these couples to get back on track. Is there a reason to be optimistic for people who are trying to recover from this? Oh, yes, that's an emphatic head nod, Julie.
JULIE: Very excited, because this study was a study of couples who went into therapy and it was the first controlled study of a fair treatment that had a control group. So we had a wait list control group, we also had another group who didn't even get any therapy. A wait list group means couples who had affairs but who waited a couple of months before going into therapy. So you could look at how were the couples doing who got immediate treatment versus the couples who didn't get treatment, until they finally did. So, what we are seeing so far, it's not completed yet, but we have a pre test and a post test of how the couples are feeling about one another, are they turning towards one another, are they listening to each other's needs, how is their fighting going, is there a lot of hostility? And we're finding that after our treatment model, which I can also tell you about, they are doing so much better, significantly better, than they were doing before. And maybe even before the affair occurred. What we're helping to do is to build marriage number two with the same partner, because an affair sets fire to the whole sound relationship house and burns it to the ground.
JOHN: For the couples for whom we've actually done six month follow up after treatment, and we haven't done it for the complete sample yet, for those couples, the amazing finding is that They actually get better after therapy, whereas in most therapies, couples deteriorate after treatment. In our therapy, they actually get better from the end of therapy to the follow up. So that that's really a very optimistic finding.
ELISE: Because they're learning tools?
JULIE: So here's the model. There are three stages to treatment and you know, it's so interesting because we found when we just did a survey of therapists doing therapy for affairs, 50 percent of the therapies or the therapists didn't talk about the affair at all. It was just incredible. So we begin with a stage we call atonement. And in Atonement, it's definitely a one way street in which the hurt partner, or what we call the uninvolved partner who didn't have the affair, can ask any question they want to their partner and get transparent, real, honest answers. So, how much did you spend, what hotel did you stay at, what gifts did you give him, you know, there can be many, many questions.
I once had a client who came in with two notebooks of questions. It took 10 weeks for her to ask all the questions to him. So, also in Atonement, we help the hurt partner to express her feelings about the affair without criticism or contempt. And that seems illogical in some ways, because there's so much blame, there's so much hurt, there's so much criticism of the other person. However, what that hurt person does is they describe themselves, what the affair did to them inside: I felt destroyed, I felt decimated, I felt desolate. But, the other person Has to hear those feelings and does their best to empathize with that hurt partner. To really understand the impact of their having an affair on the marriage and their partner.
And then they have to express remorse: an apology, deep, deep, deep apology, very real, very sincere, and they may need to do that over and over and over again, session after session after session, until finally the hurt partner is ready to move on. When they move on, then there's the rebuilding of the marriage in a stage we call attunement. And what attunement means is really learning how to tune into your partner and listen to their needs, listen to their emotions, including anger, try to empathize with those, not get critical, not get blamed, and be more defensive. Reduce flooding, trying to eliminate it so that they really can connect through a much healthier way of dealing with problems between them than what was happening before. We also talk about turning towards one another. And what that means is when a person just makes a bid to the other for interest, like, wow, look at that tree. Isn't it beautiful? The other says, Yes, it is beautiful. That's all it takes for turning toward, as opposed to turning away, which means ignoring what the person said, or turning against them.
By saying something like, Stop interrupting me. Leave me alone. So, we're teaching the couple all these tools to rebuild their marriage in a really healthy way. And, it's interesting, because it's almost like the marriage, because it's gone, is now a blank slate. And they want to learn everything they can to rebuild a healthier marriage. Then, in step three, once they've worked through attunement, there is what we call attachment. And in attachment, typically, this isn't always true, but typically, many couples then return to having a sexual relationship. It's very hard for a lot of her partners to engage in physical intimacy because they're suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
They're having flashbacks. Even if they didn't see their partner with the affair partner, they're imagining what that might've looked like. They're imagining what the affair partner looked like, you know, always more attractive than they feel they are. Maybe inaccurate, but that's how it feels. They're having big ups and downs in their emotions and they're very hyper vigilant looking for signs that there is still an affair going on. So that precludes being physically intimate because how much more vulnerable can you be than making love with your partner? Don't want to expose that vulnerability at first because you're so afraid of being hurt. So oftentimes during the attachment phase, they're engaging in intimacy and sexuality again, but in a lot of times a different way.
It's not mechanical, right? It's not pornographic. It's not, Brace yourself, Martha. You know, it's not, let's finish this up because I got to get to work. Instead, they're taking their time. There's emotional connection as well as sexual connection. That's what's getting built during that attachment phase and commitment. Commitment is absolutely crucial here. They re commit in a very different and deeper way. And some couples will actually do another ritual to honor that commitment that is now being made in a much healthier way.
JOHN: We had All kinds of couples in this study. We had couples where the person having the affair was the wife, where the person having the affair was the husband, and we had gay and lesbian couples in the study as well. So, it was a really much broader study.
JULIE: I don't think we had any trans couples though, did we? No. Yeah, that's to come. We haven't studied trans couples yet.
ELISE: I want to talk about the findings in your large international study about the increased amounts of respect and in gay and lesbian couples and the lesser degree of dominance. I thought that was so fascinating. This is going back to conflict, but finishing up on the infidelity, because it's Very common, right? It's one of the things that I am terrified of in my own relationship because I can, even just hearing you talk about it, I feel PTSD, even though it hasn't happened to me at this point. And yet at the same time, I recognize like, well, if you're married for long enough, it's certainly possible. But it's really common, right? Or maybe not as common as we're led to believe.
JOHN: It's hard to really estimate the probability because when you hand out questionnaires in an airport, the way Shirley Glass did, most people throw them away, so you're not sure you're getting a real representative sample, but as far as we can tell, it's really somewhere between 15 to 25 percent of couples who will experience an infidelity. So for the most part, it doesn't happen. And then Carol Roswell's research really comes in here because it talks about the critical ingredient of giving voice to your complaints to your partner and really thinking in your mind, you know, this is the love of my life. I really need to talk to him or her about what I feel and what I need. And then you wind up really cherishing what you have rather than feeling sorry for yourself for what you don't have. So those ingredients really a fair proof for relationship. And so it's not something that can happen to you like a tornado. Do you have no control over, you can actually control these things in your relationship, if you really turn toward one another when you're upset and give voice to your complaints and also cherish your partner and realize how lucky you are. I always think every day when I wake up next to Julie, you know how lucky I am to have the most wonderful woman in the world for me, right next to me. It's just great. And so when I'm upset with Julie, I'm going to talk to her about it. Cause, you know, she's the person that I love and who I need to talk to about these problems. So it doesn't have to be something that you fear and that you have no control over because you really have control over this.
ELISE: Your last book which we've talked about on this podcast before but the eight dates a short guide to reconnection and some repair, as someone in my relationship We are probably avoidant validator somewhere in that mix and we can really stow loneliness just because we both like a certain amount of alone time, et cetera. And I will say from having done, you know, I loved that weekend workshop with you guys. That was so fun. But also some of the interventions in that book are just paying attention to it, flagging it. Because I will have moments where I'm like, where's my husband? I'm so lonely. And then I can actually bridge it. It can feel very existential and threatening. And then we can rebuild it quickly within a conversation. Why does it feel so extreme? I don't know if I'm alone in feeling that, but I can go immediately to, I'm alone.
JULIE: Well, you know, I think from alone to loneliness For some people is a very short step. It may have to do with being more extroverted and wanting to connect more and more and more, maybe more than your introverted partner. Might have something to do with that, and so you're missing the connection a lot. For John and I, each one of us can get lonely pretty fast. I'm an introvert. He's an extrovert. But if he is Working on, I don't know what, working on a book or something, or working on a research study. Or playing the fiddle. Or playing the fiddle downstairs, far away, where it's safe, then I can get lonely too. Because it feels like the house is empty. He's gone. He's not there. And all of us, as I was saying earlier, we are pack animals. We need our connection. We need our main person there a lot of the times. And if we're preoccupied, if we're distracted, then yeah, fine. You know, we're doing other stuff. It's not a big deal. But if we're sitting, And we're really hoping to have connection and our partner isn't there. Our partner may, you know, be downstairs or in the next room, but they're preoccupied with something else, then we begin to feel devalued, unimportant, taken for granted , worthless, sometimes even invisible, and that's painful. I think also that childhood has something to do with this. If we grew up very popular with lots of friends, blah, blah, blah, then it doesn't hurt quite as much as when, if we were children who were very, very lonely, how loneliness feels now.
Loneliness can feel much more acute, much more painful, because there are echoes of our childhood loneliness within it. It's triggering an even more painful loneliness. Because in childhood, we feel things a hundred times more intensely than we do as adults, which is interesting. So if that gets triggered, that childhood loneliness, my God, you know, it breaks our heart.
JOHN: So we got a baby monitor, so that Julie can be the baby, and she can go to the other end of the monitor and say, John, come out upstairs. And then I put away the fiddle.
JULIE: No, that's not what I say. What I say is "wah" and then it comes running. It's really good. And, you know, he's a very excellent partner at that point.
ELISE: That's a good idea. We have a small house, so I can just chirp and he'll hear me, but we've established some rules, like we try to go to bed at the same time, et cetera, which I think is incredibly helpful, right? Because otherwise we can just miss each other. We've talked about this, but there's that stunning statistic about it parents of smaller children, where they talk for what, 35 minutes a week? Is that the statistic?
JOHN: Yeah, that was the Sloan study at UCLA of dual career couples with young children and they found that they spend less than 10 percent of an evening in the same room.
ELISE: Wow.
JOHN: and over the course of a week, they talk maybe 35 minutes on average. And most of that is about errands, who's going to do what when rather than having open ended questions where they say, how's life treating you, baby, you know, how do you feel about your job. How do you feel about being a mom? How do you feel about being a dad? And what do you want our life to be like five years from now, say, so they don't ask those kinds of questions and they naturally drift apart because the relationship doesn't get priority.
ELISE: Let's talk about that, the dream work, the way that conflict so often is on top of our undiagnosed dreams, right? Or what, maybe what we haven't even admitted to ourselves.
JULIE: Yeah, that's exactly right, Elise. So a lot of times people fight on the surface and they may be fighting about a relatively important issue like parenting, it's not always nothing, it's style of parenting or how much money should we save versus spend etc. However, they're rarely getting down to the core of their position on the issue, which is subterranean. It's buried deep inside. They might not have had time to really reflect on why is this such a big deal to me? Why is this so important? So what we did is we created an intervention or an exercise that people can access all of this stuff is accessible now on a software platform we have called Gottman Connect, all the exercises, all the teaching, all the interventions. And this exercise is called the Dream Within Conflict exercise in which one person is the listener, the other is the speaker, and the listener is simply asking those big open ended questions. We have six of them listed to really open up the partner and understand what is beneath their position on the issue and then we trade roles. That person is asking us the same question. So we each have an opportunity to excavate and draw up what Is really key for us. What makes it so important? And it might be an ideal dream, or it might be some childhood history that really influences our position on the issue. Or it could be simply a sense of, I guess I would call existential purpose. It relates to the legacy you want to leave behind, your position on this issue is so pivotal to your identity that it is who you are, it's an aspect. of who you are. And if you give that up, it feels like you're giving up the bones of your body. But your partner may not know that, nor may you, if you've been staying on the surface. So it takes some deeper reflection, but my God, the intimacy that comes out of that, that's where you build incredible connection through conflict.
JOHN: So when conflicts are gridlocked like that, and we see that reflected in parties who go to war, or in Congress where there's no working with the other party, it's because there's this underlying set of values or beliefs or dreams or hopes or wishes that they're not getting to. So nobody feels really safe enough to talk about what's most meaningful to them. And these six very simple questions unearthed that, the excavation is a great model. Our grandson loves trucks, and he loves the excavator. And I think those six questions are the excavator. That's right. Yeah.
ELISE: Well, it's interesting thinking how we even opened this conversation, John, when you were talking about needs and how we want our partner to anticipate them. We have trouble articulating them. I think to your point, Julie, sometimes we don't even know what we need or want. And I sometimes get into this, and this sounds so cheap, there's almost like a, I don't want you to meet my need because I don't want to have to meet any more of your needs, right? Like a tit for tat, in part because I think so many of us haven't accessed these deeper, like this would be amazing, like this is my dream, I recognize I'm not gonna get it in one day or one year, it's gonna take a lifetime, but I wonder if we couldn't do this deeper work with our partners to really understand what that looks like, if we wouldn't feel so much scarcity around being in service to each other.
JULIE: That's a wonderful point to bring up, Elise, that sometimes we feel like we're giving and giving and giving and giving, and we're also keeping score.
ELISE: Yeah.
JULIE: keeping score, that's a problem. That's really a problem. Because that's not how relationships are built. That isn't how relationships work, actually. There have been theories that that is the best thing for a relationship, and it really isn't. What we found is that when you're making a decision, if you consider your partner's needs as important as your own, or maybe even a little more important than your own, that is what creates a successful relationship. Create that trust. That's right. Both people are doing that. And, I remember, Elise, when our daughter was much younger, both of us felt very needy of other things. You know, we felt needy for exercise. We felt needy for alone time. We felt needy for time with our friends. And so on, who was going to get their needs met. And I remember times when both of us, you know, were like, I want to exercise. Well, no, I want to exercise, and somebody had to stay home with our daughter. So we would at those times say, Oh my God, both of us are so needy. What are we going to do? And neither one of us felt like we had the resources to give to the other.
So, you know, we would compromise in some kind of way. But, eventually, things typically Balance out. They don't balance out at that time, right? But, John, for example, I might be giving him lots of extra time to do whatever he needed to do. But then, if I had one of my infinite number of surgeries, man, was he there for me. He was incredibly there for me in a way that I'd never experienced before from anybody, parents or other. So, there, my goodness, there, there was the love, there was the cherishing, there was the giving back.
JOHN: Well, here's a really important point that Julie's raising, I think. In a lot of relationships, we see the standoff, where, you know, people refuse to think for two, they really, they're really two strong personalities opposed to one another, and each person is negotiating for the best deal for themselves, and it's kind of like your gain is my loss. And my game is your loss. Who's going to win? And they can't negotiate a situation where both people win. And those people who live in that kind of a relationship, we found, die sooner. We thought these people were just not returning our phone calls. And it turned out that those people had died in a one to two year old study.
JULIE: And it's hard to return a phone call when you're dead.
JOHN: So that standoff kind of marriage, where it's a zero sum game, you know, my gain is your loss, and they're always negotiating for the best deal for themselves. They never build that trust. And it turns out their hearts are working harder at every beat, their beating heart, their blood pressure is higher, and eventually their body gives out sooner.
ELISE: Yeah, and I think it was in our last conversation when we were talking about sort of the impact versus intention and also how the research suggests that when we're so focused on everything that's not being done or everything that we are doing, we miss everything that our partner is actually taking care of, right? We're somehow blind to their movement as they take the trash out, right? we're not accurate documenters of what's really happening in our relationships.
JULIE: Yeah, that's such an important point, behavioral therapy for couples initially assumed that in an unhappy relationship, people weren't very good to each other. They weren't being loving and kind and generous. But the truth was, and Robinson and Price discovered this in a great study, that they were being positive, but their partner was missing 50 percent of the positivity. They weren't perceiving it. They have a habit of mind where they were catching their partner doing things right. They were always looking for their partner's mistakes. And so they missed all the good stuff.
ELISE: yeah. Oh, you guys are always full of not only fascinating insights, but so much wisdom, and I loved this book. I took 20 pages of notes, there's also so many great charts, I love the idea of just ripping out pages and putting them on the fridge and then you go and you consult the chart, right? As you guys do. How do I figure out what I'm feeling? This is what I'm feeling, until we learn these skills. Skill building. We all desperately need an advanced course in navigating the world, particularly because the world is not really how we would prefer it to be, right? The world doesn't match our preferences, as devastating as that is. Alright, well thank you and have a wonderful day.
I love the Gottmans, I write about our experience at our weekend retreat with tons of other couples in On Our Best Behavior, but it was something that Rob and I still think about and talk about. And I realize, after we signed off, that I flag that we would come back to this insight that they offered about how gay and lesbian couples differed, and it’s quite interesting actually, this was part of one of their vast studies that they did (I think with maybe like 40,000 couples) and they write “John and his collaborator Robert Levenson ran an observational study with twenty-one same-sex couples for over a decade that came to be known as “the 12 year study.” They observed that gay and lesbian couples, to begin with, seemed to have a better capacity to laugh at themselves—in conflict, they tended not to take things as personally as heterosexual couples. They also tended to be more positive and upbeat during fights; they were more likely to use humor and affection, even in the midst of conflict. And along with that came lower levels of physiological arousal—less flooding.” They go on to say, “Whatever the reasons, what the data showed is that the same-sex couples from the 12 Year Study, which wrapped up in 2003, were much more sensitive to not dominating each other.” So may we all learn from our friends who are in same-sex relationships how to navigate conflict as well, as they seem to be far more masterful at it. This is a great book, it’s full of lists and cheat sheets that they are essentially like you can just tape this up until you get the hang of it; repairs lists, ways to understand if you and your partner might be “flooding,” how to navigate a fight and it’s stages, they articulate that those stages are setting an agenda and then persuasion, but it depends on the conflict style, some people start at persuasion without trying to understand they actual agenda or what’s underneath. And the third stage is attempting to reach a compromise, but many couples skip persuasion or go right to persuasion and their point is all in good time, it’s important to excavate what’s at play otherwise you’re destined to conflict. Alright, as you can see, I love this stuff. I could keep going and going and going, but that’s enough for now. I will see you next time.
